A DEEP SPACE PERFORMANCE RESIDENCY
Notice to Appear by Irina Kruzhilina | Photo by Pavel Antonov
“Notice to Appear” A Work In Progress by Irina Kruzhilina
Notice to Appear is a hybrid theatrical performance and staged public tribunal that exposes the hidden mechanics of U.S. immigration courts and the arbitrary forces determining asylum seekers’ fates. It interrogates the roles of all court actors—and the public’s responsibility—in the ongoing asylum crisis.
Background and Sources
The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states that any person persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, belonging to a social group, or political opinion has the right to request asylum. The most crucial part of the process is the Individual Merits Hearing, where, for several hours, an immigration judge assesses the worth of the individual against these five criteria and exercises outsized discretion over whether the asylum seeker stays or goes. These decisions disappear into a kind of black hole — unseen, unrecorded, and inaccessible unless you are directly entangled in a case. Notice to Appear brings these opaque proceedings into public view, exposing how “justice” is administered behind closed doors.
Notice to Appear draws from extensive interviews with immigration judges, ICE attorneys, immigration lawyers, court interpreters, policymakers, and asylum seekers, as well as dozens of firsthand immigration court observations.
WJFF’s “Radio Chatskill” interview with Irina Kruzhilina
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Irina Kruzhilina is an award winning multi-hyphenate theater maker whose various hats include director, scenographer, experience designer, professor, playwright, and artistic director.
Raised in Moscow in an intercultural household with a Ukrainian mother and Georgian father, Irina creates work that grapples with social issues, exploring identity, displacement, and belonging.
“...extraordinary designs find visual analogues for the playwrights’ evocative musings on memory, motherhood, race, sex, disease, and dreams of both the waking and sleeping variety.”
Since 2000, her credits include performances spanning interdisciplinary downtown theatre, large-scale parades, opera, and site-responsive installations. Her work has been shown at Times Square, Tokyo Disney, BAM, Prague National Theatre, the NY Philharmonic, the XXI Commonwealth Games, and Barbican Center.
Irina's current work centers on two primary forms: site-specific performances and socially engaged projects with community members to address issues like immigration, polarization, conflict, and peacebuilding.
SpaceBridge | Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
Relentless in her ambition and risk-taking, she pushes the boundaries of theatre to create work that is both artistically daring and socially urgent. She launched SpaceBridge, a theatre workshop and devised performance uniting 19 refugee and American children — most of whom had never before been on stage. Leading a team of 60 collaborators, she transformed their stories into a fully realized Off-Broadway production. After being named a critics’ pick at the 2025 Under The Radar Festival, the SpaceBridge workshop curriculum is expanding to develop new performances with local and refugee youth in the U.S. and globally.
Kruzhilina is the founder of Visual Echo, a New York-based performance organization fostering generative dialogues among people from diverse backgrounds who rarely intersect.
She is an associate professor at the New School of Drama, where she co-developed a new MFA program in Contemporary Theatre and Performance. She is a La MaMa resident artist and recipient of the 2024 Joan D. Firestone Fund Award and the 2024 Elliot Norton Award.